by Eando Binder
"What is your name?" she asked. "I am Leela. I watched you sleeping. You are good to look at"
York understood, though the words were a form of English queerly slurred.
"Anton York," he returned, trying to ease his archaic accent to something approaching hers.
The name that would have made any contemporary citizen of Earth freeze into awe and incredulous wonder failed to bring more than a welcoming smile to the girl's lips.
"An-ton Y-york," she repeated. "Anton York. I like it. And you are nice. I love you!"
Without another word she threw her arms around his neck, kissing him. York gasped at the girl's directness and pushed her away gently.
"Just a minute," he objected, and for perhaps the first time in centuries, he stammered a little. Fleetingly he felt glad that the wall of force kept Vera from knowing about the kiss. "Certainly you don't mean what you say—"
"But I do," insisted the girl softly, kissing him again.
"Don't you want me to love you?"
York had to think for a moment. And for a moment he glanced around dizzily, aware that the girl's presence made the setting seem almost a paradise. Then his eyes caught a glint of pink skin a dozen yards away, behind leafy bushes.
Instantly the camouflage that had made the place seem so wonderful vanished. It was in reality a hell, in which the hypno-beast not only played man against man, but woman against man!
York pushed the girl away. The monster, divining that it had been seen, lumbered forward. Over York swayed the serpentine neck and gleaming eyes of the Beast, reminding him of all the tragedies he had seen, in this dome and the others.
York sprang erect. Their eyes locked.
York's first impulse was to dash at the monster and twist its thin neck. But when he tried, he had the sensation of plunging into an invisible flood of force that tore at him and beat him back. It came from those glittering saucer eyes—the hypnotic force!
York tried to wrench his eyes from the Medusa stare that turned him to helpless stone, but failed. He fought the intangible force for a stubborn minute before he eased back.
Still he could not tear his eyes away. Now the force changed. Like a resistless gravity, it pulled him forward, but at the same time locked his arm muscles. He fought to strain backward against the ghostly hands that seemed to draw him forward. One step—two steps-- He advanced like a bird caught in the spell of a snake.
The dome, trees, grass, girl—all had vanished. York saw only two enormous, deadly, compelling eyes that seemed to grow and fill the whole universe—He did not even see the quivering tentacle that stretched in anticipation for his throat.
But all the while, within York, something had been working. His subconscious mind gave the call of alarm. His immortality radiogens, stored with cosmic energy that constantly battled the poisons of old age and the raids of deadly germs, released a tide of power to his brain.
York stopped, stiffening, fighting the invisible force with renewed strength. The hypnotic force gave one final tug. York swayed, straining, and then took a step backward.
The spell snapped like the twang of a bowstring. York had won.
He leaped forward, but now in command of himself. The Beast bleated in fear, trying to run. York easily overtook it, grasped the neck and wrung it like that of a chicken. The head drooped on its broken neck. The hellish eyes glazed. The body thrashed wildly for several minutes before it finally lay still in death.
York stared at it with hands on hips, panting more in loathing and rage than exertion. Never in all his exploits had he felt more completely satisfied. He had destroyed a fleet of powerful ships once, and moved worlds, and wielded a godlike science. But here with his bare hands he had killed a repulsive beast. That was his supreme achievement!
After a while, he smiled in detached calm at the strange contrast between this event and the others in his stirring career. His thoughts were terminated by a pair of soft arms that stole about his neck.
"You have saved me-freed me!" Leela murmured. "Now I truly love you. Take me with you."
York disengaged himself firmly.
"Leela, I have a wife. I've had her for a long, long time and wouldn't change now!"
He wondered what she would say if he told her he was two thousand years old. He decided not to, for the present. "You have a—mate?'
"Yes." York was relieved, for she did not press her attention. "Now- tell me about this beast, and you." To himself he mused: "Beauty and the Beast."
"The master brought me here, where the Free Ones often come. If we found a young man—as we did you—I was to lure him with me, away from any others. It was a hateful duty, please believe that. Then the Beast would either kill him or bring him back to be a slave. The Beasts use all sorts of means to reduce the numbers of the Free Ones. They are trying to kill off all those of the Free Ones who are too mind-powerful to become slaves."
"You mean there are certain ones here who can resist the Beasts' spell, like myself?"
The girl looked at him, puzzled.
"Surely you know that. Why do you ask questions as though you have never been here before?'
"I haven't," York said. "I came from outside the dome wall."
She stared at him in sudden astonishment, at his strange clothes, at his oddly glowing eyes, the sign of immortality.
After a moment, shrugging helplessly, she answered his questions.
"Yes, many can resist the spell. And each generation there are more."
"Generation!" gasped York. "You've never heard of me, Anton York? You've never been on Earth?"
"Earth? You mean the Original World, which our forefathers came from, they say. No, of course not. I was born here."
"And how many generations have there been, according to that story?'
"One hundred"
One hundred generations! At least two thousand years! For twenty centuries Earth people had been under this great dome, living and dying, in some gigantic experiment carried out by the dome builders. York shook his head. More and more it loomed as something vital and far reaching—and sinister.
"Do you know why this was done?" he pursued. "Why your forefathers were taken from the Original World and brought here? Or where the hypno-beasts came from?"
"I know little," vouched the girl. "But perhaps at the village of the Free Ones some of the learned men know. Come, I'll lead you there."
Glancing at him in growing wonder, she turned. York followed.
The way led out of the small forest, into open land. There were more grazing lands for cattle and beyond lay a checkerboard of tilled fields with ripening crops. Nut-browned men laboured among them and waved greetings. They all had rifles and looked cautiously behind York and Leela to make sure they were not slaves of the hypno-beasts, on some sinister errand.
The village two miles ahead struck a chord of ancient memory in York's mind. It was a stockaded camp, surrounded by a wall of high wooden posts with here and there a lookout station. Within were log cabins and horse-drawn wagons and buckskin garbed people. It was a setting that had vanished from Earth's history since the nineteenth century. It was here, reincarnated and apparently jelled. Why?
York's mind bristled with unanswered questions. He was impatient when an elderly woman spied them. She dropped an armload of kindling wood and hugged Leela.
"My child, my child!" she cried, yet with a stoic lack of tears in her motherly joy. "You are back. I thought I'd never see you again. It's been a year. Leela, my baby—"
"He rescued me." Leela pointed to York. An eager crowd formed around, shouting greetings to the girl who had miraculously returned from the slavehood of the Beasts. "He killed my Beast master with his bare hands!" She told the story.
The crowd gaped at York in awe. As much, York mused, as the peoples of the thirty-first century had gaped at him for moving worlds. Here he had done nothing more than wring a Beast's neck. He hadn't used a single scientific principle except that a broken spine caused death.
Y
ork made an impatient gesture and the girl understood. She led him to the center of the village where a two-storied cabin stood, guarded by two long-haired stalwarts with rifles. One of them started and greeted Leela with a hug and kiss. York smiled at her hungry response. It relieved him entirely of his role as hero-rescuer, with which she had girlishly surrounded him.
The young man stuck out his hand, after the story, and wrung York's hand with a grip of steel. No weaklings, these men. Then he spoke hesitantly.
"According to custom, Leela is yours."
"But I have a mate," York returned quickly. "She is outside the dome wall." He began to explain. Seeing their blank stares, he asked again for an audience with those in authority.
"You mean the Congress." The young guard went in and returned after a moment, nodding. "They will see you."
The Congress proved to be a group of ten elderly, gray-haired men, past the days of physical activity but wise in years and experience. They listened as Leela once again gave the details.
"It is a strange story," said Robar, the head of the council. "Who are you, Anton York? I have never heard the name York among our people." There was suspicion in his voice, and in all their stares. "You may be from the Beast village, sent as a spy. The Beasts try all sorts of tricks in their attempt to subdue us."
The atmosphere became tense, and the young guard even raised his gun threateningly.
"No!" It was Leela who sprang to York's defence. "Don't forget I was in the Beast village for a year. The name is not known there, either. If he is a spy, so am I, for I came from the Beasts."
The impassioned words served to heighten the tension, included the girl in their suspicions. York stepped forward with determination.
"Listen to me. I have lived for two thousand years. I was born on what you know as the Original World, in the twentieth century. In the year seventeen-seventy-six, thirteen colonies in a land called America declared their independence from a land across the Atlantic Ocean. They formed a Congress. Your Congress comes from that. In the following century, the thirteen colonies grew, pushing westward against redmen called Indians. Eventually the land stretched from ocean to ocean. There was a Civil War, the assassination of a great man named Lincoln. Then an industrial empire arose, oil was found, gold. A steam railroad spanned the continent. Buffalo herds were exterminated."
Excitement grew in the men's faces.
"It fits in with our legends," whispered Robar. 'The thirteen American tribes—the redmen—the Big War—buffalo vanishing." He looked at York with sudden awe. "I believe you, Anton York. You have come from the Original World to help us?"
"If I can," York nodded. "But first I must know all I can. What do your legends tell of coming here?"
Robar pondered, as though searching misty impressions handed down from father to son.
"Little. Until eighteen-eighty-eight, our forefathers lived on the Original World, in a village like this, called Fort Mojave. They fought the redmen at times. But one day strange flying ships appeared, against which their guns were useless. The whole village of a thousand men, women and children was forcibly taken here. At first there were no Beasts. They lived with little trouble, though sad at being taken for their home world. Then the Beasts appeared suddenly, and life became a constant battle against them. So it has been for generations."
"But why were they brought here?" York queried. "And why were the hypno-beasts introduced into this bit of transplanted Earth?"
"It was never known. Not one glimpse of those mysterious people is recorded. Life has gone on, as it must. We have almost come to forget how it all started. All we concern ourselves with is the survival against the Beasts."
York bit his lips. The mystery was still unexplained. The dome builders had not vouched one item of information to their bell jar specimens. Nor, probably, to any of the other kidnaped beings in all the other domes.
Rage shook Anton York. It was cold-blooded, autocratic, cruel if not actually vicious—this experimentation with generations upon generations of poor, marooned groups of beings. Something must be done!
6
IN THE following days, York found out all he could ever find out, under the dome itself. The village of the Free Ones housed about six thousand people. Their fields and hunting ground occupied a little more than half of the total space under the dome. Beyond a narrow river that bisected the area was the territory in control of the hypno-beasts and their mental slaves. It was understood that the slaves numbered about four thousand. But their life-span was short, for the Beasts bred them as food.
In all, then, there were ten thousand human beings under the dome, in this isolated bit of Earth. That meant over three hundred persons per square mile, more crowded than Europe had been before the scientific era of soilless crops! Under those circumstances, waging a grim battle against the Beasts constantly, science had not had a chance to advance. The few deposits of metal ores and important minerals had long since been worked out. Metal was hoarded like gold.
York's observations included the river. It sprang from underground, near one dome wall, and vanished underground again at the opposite side. A thousand feet above, under the center of the dome, he could vaguely see the giant, gleaming apparatus that duplicated sunlight in regular twenty-four hour periods. At times it puffed out clouds, showers and even fogs. Outside the dome was a hydrocarbon atmosphere, a climate ranging from Uranian cold to Mercurian heat under a variable Cepheid sun. In here was a bit of Ireland or California.
The builders had done a perfect job. But why?. The question rang like a gong in York's mind. And gradually he came to have the feeling of being watched. He sensed eyes above that looked down, coldly and scientifically, watching over all and recording the pulse of life beneath. It was a maddening sensation.
York felt like screaming at times, though for two thousand years he had learned to control his emotions with almost god-like equanimity. The other people had come to accept dome life as normal, natural, and all else as illusion or legend.
York temporarily shelved the matter of the grand purpose behind all this. The immediate problem was the hypno-beasts. If he could do something against them, he would perhaps be foiling in some small way the scheme of the master-scientists.
One horrible thought lurked in his mind. Suppose the dome builders were propagating the hypno-beasts for the eventual purpose of dominating the universe with them?
"We hope to conquer the Beasts in due time," Robar informed him. "In each generation a higher percentage of the children are almost completely immune to the Beasts' hypnotic powers. For the first thousand years, the village of Free Ones was small and barely escaped extinction hundreds of times, but in the past thousand years our numbers have increased. Today we outnumber the slave group. In another few centuries—"
"Too long to wait," York interrupted. "The hypno-beasts are semi-intelligent, but not scientific. Science can destroy them. How do your guns operate?"
Examination proved that the rifles were models of the flint-lock muskets of the nineteenth century. The bullets were of hard wood, to conserve metal. The propellant was powdered charcoal. Because of the peculiar laws of this universe, the mere firing of a pinch of charcoal had the power of guncotton, as York's rocket had worked with slow-burning phosphorus.
"There's some all-embracing equation behind it all," York told himself. "If I could only find it, I'd have the power to wipe out the Beasts, blast down the dome, and face the master race—"
A horn sounded, on this third day. It was the alarm of attack. Instantly the village mobilized. Men marched to the river, York with them. The enemy troops had crossed in wooden boats and now lay scattered behind bushes and low hills. The Free Ones took to cover and it settled down to sniping.
York, with a rifle resting in a tree crotch, could not bring himself to fire at the figures he sighted now and then. They were human, after all, even if bent on killing their own kind under the command of the hypno-beasts. The Beasts were there, across the river, directin
g their forces by long-range hypnosis. York could feel the subtle pull of it.
The sniping dragged on for hours, till the Free Ones flanked and drove the attackers back. They did a revolting thing. Hoisting their dead to their shoulders, they deposited them on the other bank, at the feet of the Beasts, who then fed. That seemed to be the sole purpose of the attack, unless it was revenge for the beast killed by York.
The opposing forces left the river bank and vanished toward their village. The short battle was over. York watched as the Free Ones went among their dead and cut them in ribbons so that all the blood drained into the ground. The grisly business was done stoically. In the curious economy of the little patch of Earth, it served to foil any chance of the Beasts feeding on them, and it also fertilized the ground. Back in the village, York found the girl Leela standing among the wounded. She bravely choked back tears as she stared down at her lover's white face.
"He will live," she whispered. "But he will never walk again. He was paralyzed by a shot in the spine. Oh, Anton York, can't you help me?"
She was suddenly weeping against his shoulder. York patted her soothingly, and then set his lips.
"Do you want to take a chance?" he asked her. "A chance that he will be whole again—or die?"
"I trust you, Anton York," the girl said instantly.
He operated. Centuries before, against the day when some physical accident might try to rob him of Vera, York had studied surgical technique and become adept. With a skill that no Earthly surgeon had ever approached, he removed the bullet with a sharp knife. Antiseptic herbs that the people cultivated protected the wound. The young man passed into a restful sleep from which he would awake fully restored.
York waved aside the girl's gratitude and shook a fist up toward the peak of the dome. Within him, rage had become a tidal force. They were playing at being gods up above, the merciless dome builders, unmoved by these tragedies.
They must be out to conquer the universe, breeding the horrible hypno-beasts as their scavenging horde! And it must be stopped.